Nearby, as always, was Chase: Mike Rinkel's constant companion, a rambunctious, singularly devoted golden retriever. The relationship between dogs and people is famously close, of course, but in this case the bond was surpassingly deep. Eight years old, with a hint of orange in her lush coat, Chase went with her master to work. She played with him, traveled with him, accompanied him everywhere. Often when Rinkel surfed, Chase ran to greet him as he swept in to shore, though today she simply gazed out from her perch on a seawall. Now and again Rinkel glanced back to check on her, until about 5 o'clock—just after his brother moved to another beach—when he hauled his surfboard out of the water. But Chase wasn't there, and Rinkel sensed instantly that something was wrong. "I was sick to my stomach," he remembers. "It was a feeling that something had been taken away from me."
Chase was nowhere to be seen along the entire stretch of Easton's Beach. Frantically but in vain, Rinkel called for her and then scoured the area, driving his Ford pickup up and down every side street. Then, desolate and alone, he made the nine-mile trip back to his home in nearby Portsmouth. His wife, Lori, and their baby daughter, Audrey, were out; he wept and began to pray. "I remember making one of those pleas to the Almighty: 'Whatever happens, let this turn out okay,' " says Rinkel, 37. "I was so lonely, and the next morning was even more hollow."
Pet owners, even adoring ones, typically do certain things when an animal goes missing: They call the police, local shelters and animal hospitals and post photocopied pictures in strategic locations. If those measures fail, they grieve and move on. Mike Rinkel was true to form up to a point. For instead of consigning Chase, now two years gone, to a hallowed spot in his memory, he has been leading a tireless crusade to find her.
In the course of their quest, he and Lori have contacted some 1,500 New England veterinarians, as well as numerous animal control officers and research laboratories. They have reached out to local newspapers and TV stations and have trekked to innumerable town halls to check dog registration records. They have even posted notices on the Internet. "I carried that dog home one day when she was 7 weeks old," says Rinkel. "I raised her. She was at my side every day for eight years. And I'm not giving up on her."
Neither has much of eastern Rhode Island. Rinkel's impassioned search has captivated many, making Chase something of a community cause. "Everybody's looking for her—it's extraordinary," says Dennis Seale, deputy police chief in Portsmouth, a seaside town of 17,000. If they find the dog, there'll probably be a parade." At the core of the search is one tantalizing clue. When Rinkel's brother John left the surf on the day Chase disappeared, he saw a retriever with her orange coloring in the back of a brown compact sedan that was pulling away from Easton's Beach. "I didn't think anything of it," says John, 36, who didn't know Mike had brought Chase to the beach. Several times, the Rinkels have sighted brown cars with golden retrievers inside. Thanks to a sympathetic source they won't name, they have used license numbers to find and stake out the car owners' homes until they could confirm that none of those dogs was Chase. Small wonder, as Lori, a 33-year-old marine biologist tells it, that when the couple sought out a private detective, "He went, 'Wow, I wouldn't have done all that.' "
But now two years have passed. Even the most zealous dog lover might concede that Mike Rinkel has gone a bit over the top. "It seems reasonable that by this time he would have experienced some sense of finality," says Jane Nathanson, a West Roxbury, Mass., animal hospital consultant who counsels grieving pet owners. "It's distressing that one would go on to constantly look, as evidently he has." Rinkel's brother agrees that the search is quixotic. "My honest opinion," John says, "is I don't think we're gonna see the dog ever again." Mike's response is elegantly uncomplicated: "We love Chase."
The intensity of that attachment, he believes, can be traced back to his own transient youth. The second of six children of Cmdr. Richard Rinkel, a Navy pilot, and his homemaker wife, Arlene, Mike moved with his family from California to Texas, back to California, to Hawaii and finally, in 1969, to Rhode Island. When he was 10, he and his siblings, tired of ephemeral friendships, pressured their parents into buying a dog: a German shepherd-collie mix named Tiki. The Rinkel kids adored her, but the dog attacked the mailman and proved a menace to strangers. "It was wigging the neighborhood out," says Mike.
Then, after six months, Mike came home from school and Tiki was gone: Mike's parents, exasperated, had given the dog away. "It was an empty feeling," he says. "After that, I always knew that when I finally put down some roots, I was gonna get a dog."
The opportunity came in 1985. By then, Rinkel had worked variously as a waiter, cook and restaurant manager in Newport, San Diego, Louisiana and on the island of Maui. After attending San Diego State University and Salve Regina University in Newport, he finally graduated—eight years after high school—with a degree in management from Johnson and Wales College in Providence. Soon he settled in an apartment in Newport, and shortly thereafter, Sheba, his brother John's golden retriever, gave birth to puppies. Mike took the friendly pick of the litter and named her Chase, for the immediate delight she took in fetching a tennis ball. He remembers how in winter she would disappear under snowdrifts, then pop up out of nowhere, and the way she would leap and snap vainly at fireflies in summer. But perhaps Rinkel's most vivid memory of Chase dates back to the fall of 1989, when he was breaking ground for his house. While removing an old fence, he felt an ominous pop in his upper spine—two herniated disks, it turned out. Spinal fusion surgery followed, after which Rinkel endured a six-month convalescence. Still single—and unable to work—Rinkel spent long, boring hours in bed. "I was all alone, vegging in the apartment in the middle of winter," he says. Through it all, Chase was by his side, her mere presence an emotional balm.
The relationship endured even as he courted Lori, whom he'd started dating in 1988. "The only time Michael ever left her was in 1991, when we went on our honeymoon," says Lori. "John and his wife watched her, and she sat at the door the whole time."
In the face of such loyalty, it is hardly surprising that Rinkel's quest is motivated by a measure of guilt. "Some elderly wealthy woman from Newport called me up," recalls Rinkel with some disgust. "She says, 'I'm Countess So-and-So, and I have poodles, and I would never allow them to be prancing around on a seawall unattended. What were you thinking?' I don't need to hear that—I do it to myself. She [Chase] got my undivided attention. Except for that brief moment. And I paid for it."
In large part, though, the Rinkels' search has been met with sympathy and support. "One of the things we've learned is that 99 percent of the people on the planet are decent," Mike says. "It's just that 1 rotten percent that make this crap happen."
He remembers fondly a man from Kingston, R.I., some 30 miles away, who around Christmas 1994 called to say he had just adopted a golden retriever, roughly Chase's age, from an animal shelter. To avoid upsetting his children, the man sneaked the dog out of the house one night and met the Rinkels at an intersection. The stranger was so unnerved at the prospect of surrendering his family pet that he couldn't make eye contact with the couple. And when they assured him the dog wasn't Chase, he heaved a deep sigh of relief. "We must have thanked him 50 times," Mike remembers. "Knowing people like that are out there is where our hope lies."
Such decency, of course, is not universal. Last January, for example, the Rinkels received several calls asking for ransom. Police tapped their phone and discovered the calls were a hoax perpetrated by teenagers at a local pizza parlor. Another time, Rinkel made a depressing excursion into the netherworld of illicit dealers who buy and sell dogs for medical and other forms of research. Many dealers are licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but some are unethical and have been known to sell stolen dogs. Two months after Chase disappeared, Rinkel went to see a dealer in the woods of northwest Massachusetts—though Chase would have been considered too old for research purposes and the man's neighbors had warned Mike to stay away from the dealer because he might be armed and dangerous. As it turned out, the remote compound was eerily deserted. "I was shaking like a leaf," says Rinkel, who was sufficiently spooked to swear off dealers altogether.
One lead, though, did have a happy conclusion. Acting on a tip from a local TV station, Lori drove 50 miles to a mall in Warwick, R.I., only to find a stray, ancient, flea-ridden retriever. When an animal control officer told her the dog would be put to sleep, Lori burst into tears and took her home.
"What is that?" demanded Mike when he saw her.
"I just couldn't leave her," said Lori, weeping again.
They named her Happy and cared for her lovingly for a year, until she died last spring. Someday they may adopt another dog, but Chase is never far from their thoughts. "I know she's sitting there waiting for Michael to pick her up," says Lori. "That's the kind of dog she is."
Perhaps, but for now Mike Rinkel sees Chase only in a recurring dream. "I find her and go to grab her," he says. "Then there's nothing there, just the tree she was sitting in front of. But the dream feels like I'm getting closer and closer."
RICHARD JEROME
STEPHEN SAWICKI in Portsmouth
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